Al Michaels became an American broadcasting legend when a ragtag US ice hockey team scored an extraordinary victory over USSR at the 1980 winter Olympics. "Do you believe in miracles?" Michaels asked as the Americans knocked out the all-conquering Soviet team in a game that would go down in sporting folklore as "the Miracle on Ice".

Thirty-two years on and with six Olympics under his belt, one of the leading voices of American sports broadcasting is fronting one of the biggest broadcasting efforts the world has ever seen for NBC.

The Olympics perhaps needs NBC more than any other paymaster. The Comcast-owned broadcasting giant paid $1.8bn for the rights to screen the London Games and has signed a $4.38bn contract for the rights to the next four summer and winter Games. But NBC needs the Olympics too. It announced last week that it has sold more than $1bn in advertising against London 2012 – $150m more than in Beijing in 2008 – including a tripling of sales (to $60m) of digital ads to run alongside live internet-streamed sports.

Sitting in his Olympic Park dressing room, decorated with vintage British flags and framed photos of his grandchildren, the 67-year old Michaels recalls how he started as an Olympic broadcaster in Sapporo in 1972 when he covered a single live ice hockey game.

"We had one man about town and nine on-air people in total, and here we are 40 years later with 115. And of course, the hours are insane. We did 37 hours in 1972." At London 2012 NBC is producing a record 3,500 hours of television – every event and every medal ceremony – and has a gargantuan operation involving 2,700 staff whose transport has involved chartering three passenger jets.

Adam Freifeld, NBC Sports Group's vice-president for communications, estimates that 200 million Americans will watch some part of its coverage. Michaels will be the daytime frontman and believes the huge audience flows from an event that "transcends sport". "You bring the world together," he says. "It is the only event that does that. I hate to sound too idealistic here but it is a glimpse of the way it all could be if we all got along all the time.

"You come here and you are reading about Syria and you think, wait a minute, why? What is this all about? The Olympics are important if for no other reason than that."

NBC has calculated that the TV audience for the Olympics in the US is 56% female, and this conditions what it calls its "storytelling model" of presentation. The network's star roving Olympics reporters, John McEnroe and Ryan Seacrest, recently attended an internal seminar tutoring them in the method. "It is making the people that are watching care about what they are watching," explains John Fritsche, senior vice-president for operations. "It is about getting up close and personal with the athletes."

NBC is using the main feed from Olympic Broadcasting Services but will have its own cameras at most venues. "They show the whole of the competition while we zoom in on the guy's face to see the emotion," says Fritsche. "We have our stories to tell."

One of those stories is the host city itself, and the familiarity of London's landmarks is an enormous help in capturing the US public's imagination, especially in comparison with Beijing. "London is as iconic a city as there is," says Michaels. "Most people will know what they are seeing. They have seen Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey. They know about them, even if they haven't been here.

"When we do the road cycling race or the marathon you might as well be on the top of a double decker bus and that's one of the ways I am going to put it in the lead to the cycling race. In terms of a backdrop it is fantastic. All these sights are so familiar to every schoolchild."

NBC has built sets to match. The primetime evening set is modelled on a long-ago gentleman's library. There are faux wood panelling, walnut desks, lead crystal decanters and sepia portraits of Victorian ladies.

It is a vision of Britain familiar to generations of US tourists, but the antithesis of the image Locog has tried to project with its neon colour schemes and graffiti-style 2012 logo.

The daytime studio is fresher and features a 28-screen video wall. Behind the scenes, the control rooms are humming with activity as technicians collate coverage from 32 sports, using computer rigs built to fit into shipping containers which arrived directly from the Vancouver Olympics.

Fritsche has been in London setting up since mid-May and admits wrestling with British health and safety rules has been tricky. His responsibility is to keep the pictures flowing across the Atlantic for what Freifeld calls "one of the most-watched TV events of all time". But "I don't have any fears," Fritsche insists. "I don't think anything is going to go wrong. We are really good at this. This is not our first rodeo. When you ask 'what are we fearing?', the answer is: not a whole lot."